July 17, 2007
Free Your iTunes Album Art!
Now that iTunes can automatically retrieve album cover art, it's easier than ever to get cover designs INTO iTunes, but what if you want to get them all OUT? Maybe to create a collage display for your personal website? Or make a poster? iTunes doesn't make it easy for you to retrieve all those covers. But it can be done.
On a Mac, the cover design files are by default in a folder named "Album Art" (home folder>Music>iTunes>Album Art). Inside there you'll find a ton of nested folders. Digging down through each eventually brings you to a file with a .itc file extension. However, those files won't open in graphic design programs like Photoshop. Hmmm... well, there's always the option of copying and pasting the covers one by one from iTunes into a photo editing program, then saving them... uh, maybe not.
Enter Album Art Extractor, a beta program from SourceForge that extracts all the cover art files in your iTunes library and saves each one as a JPEG or PNG file in a new folder.
It can also create an html/javascript web display of all your covers complete with thumbnails that continuously rotate new cover designs. Clicking on a thumb shows the cover full size in a new window. Check out the sample display we made. Album Art Extractor is currently Mac only and, as mentioned, is a beta program. Enjoy at your own risk!
Comments
The web display would be better if you could play songs from it. It's pretty cool though. Neat blog.
Posted by: Stone at December 28, 2007 04:48 PM
